May 26, 2008

Fear of DSLs?

In Fear of Parsers? I responded to Martin Fowler's posting ParserFear, arguing that more often than not, building new parsers for domain-specific languages may be too complicated for the benefits you can get from using domain-specific syntax.

To be clear about this: This is not an argument against domain-specific languages in general, only against domain-specific syntax. Domain-specific languages in Lisp are straightforward to build, easy to use once you are used to Lisp (which is not that hard either), and flexible enough to be adapted to future needs, without getting into the hairy details of designing and implementing suitable domain-specific parsers.

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